Returning to Conservative Roots: Part 2
July 8, 2008
Taken by permission from Crunch Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical freerange farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party) by Rod Dreher, published by Crown Forum, New York, 2006. Rod Dreher’s blog is: beliefnet.com/blogs/crunchycon
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. Part 1 appeared yesterday.
It’s true that Reaganism, for all the good it did, also mainstreamed a kind of conservatism that viewed environmentalism with contempt. Scorning environmentalists as tree-hugging kooks became a way of proving one’s right-wing bona fides. The role the reactionary liberalism of environmental activists played in empowering conservative ideologues can hardly be overstated. They reacted to every defeat by becoming ever more strident and absolutist in their rhetoric. By the year 2000, a poll by the market research firm Environics found that 41 percent of those surveyed thought of environmentalists as “extremists, not reasonable people.”
Conservatives pride themselves on being hardheaded realists, but our lack of serious concern about the environment does not match reality. Despite the presence of ideologically driven junk science, the evidence for global warming caused by human activity is so overwhelming that conservative columnist John Leo likens right-wing deniers to tobacco company executives who claim there’s no solid link between smoking and lung cancer. Even if the evidence were inconclusive, given the catastrophic results of a global temperature rise — including fiercer hurricanes, flooding of coastal cities, the loss of vast inhabited and cultivated regions to desertification or frost— would compel the prudent conservative (which used to be a redundant phrase) to act as if the worst was likely. The price of being wrong is incalculable - especially considering the century or more scientists estimate it would take for the earth to rebound from global warming even if we slashed carbon emissions virtually to the bone tomorrow.
“Man’s power now enormously exceeds natural limits, and we can now do things that were inconceivable only a few generations ago. So it’s a new problem, and these are grave new challenges,” said Matthew Scully. Global warming is the most serious crisis overtaking mankind as the result of our refusal to live within our means, and to use our immense power wisely, but it is not the only one. In the spring of 2005, a worldwide coalition of 1,360 scientists, under United Nations auspices, issued the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a report that its authors called a “stark warning” to the world. Two-thirds of the world’s natural resources have already been used up by humans, the report said, and the pressure we are putting on the natural world — the rain forests, the wetlands, the fisheries — is so unrelenting and harmful “that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”
The report called out the “dangerous illusions” harbored by the rest of us, who think of nature as something separate from our daily lives, a place we go visit on the weekend or watch on Discovery Channel nature documentaries. In truth, mankind relies on nature to recycle the air we breathe, the water we drink, and much of the food we eat. Man is not an island.
These are far more than “environmental problems”. They are economic problems. They are national-security problems. They are public-health problems. They are “family-values” problems. They are religious problems.
The problem is that most of us think about global warming, the depletion of fisheries, and the eradication of the rain forests as “environmental” problems. In truth, they are far more than that. They are economic problems. They are national-security problems. They are public-health problems. They are “family-values” problems. They are religious problems. In their iconoclastic 2004 essay “The Death of Environmentalism” liberal environmental activists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus leveled this indictment against the leadership of the nation’s environmental groups, saying that their near-obsession with the environment as a standalone issue is one big reason the environmental movement has lost so much political power in the last twenty years.
This is the kind of thing they were talking about, and which conservatives appreciate: to the paper-mill worker in south Louisiana, “saving the environment” is an abstraction that appeals to elites; he’s worried about putting food on the table for his family. It’s very easy for business interests to paint environmentalists as the kind of do-gooders who are going to cost him his job by hurting the mill with costly regulation that will force the mill owners to relocate to Mexico. If that’s the trade-off, no wonder the mill worker is going to fight environmentalists.
Consider, though, that the same mill worker may be coming home from work most days with nosebleeds from harmful chemicals in the air. (This is not a hypothetical situation; it really happened to a close relative of mine, a staunch Limbaugh-loving Republican.) Consider that the mill’s owners threaten the union with moving south of the border, which is a lot easier to do under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), if the union pushes for safer working conditions.
Consider also how much support environmental crusaders might have gotten from churches and ordinary conservative working folks if they understood the genuine fear these men would have of losing their jobs, but also the natural concern they would have about cancer and other diseases they might acquire from dangerous working conditions, and which would leave their families fatherless. To have made those kinds of connections would have required the environmentalists to rub shoulders with dittoheads like my relative. And it would have required dittoheads to accept that they can have something in common with liberals.
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